An extremist, not a fanatic

October 07, 2013

Ignore the newspapers

Another day brings another furore about the press, the latest being about The Sun's stigmatizing the mentally ill. This poses the question: why should we fret about newspapers' misconduct?

I'll fess up here. I read the Mail most days. But I also read Holy Moly and Popbitch, and for similar reasons. I don't regard any of them as politically serious.

In fact, there's decent evidence that the political importance of the dead trees was over-rated, even before their circulation began to fall. Here's one US study (pdf) by Jesse Shapiro and colleagues:

We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects. We find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents.

Relative to the often highly evocative and strident manner in which the British press often conducts itself, its partisan impact is a small one.

Since then, it's highly likely - given their falling sales - that newspapers' influence has declined further. In the last general election, there was no relationship between the papers' political positions and aggregate votes.

Sure, there is some countervailing evidence. Fox News does seem to have influenced American voters; a neat experiment suggests papers can affect voting; and there's evidence that local papers can encourage turnout and hence improve the vigour of local democracy.

On balance, though, we probably exaggerate the influence of the press. And insofar as this does exist, it's likely that its many infractions against decency are eroding it still further.

Of course, journalists think that newspapers matter enormously, but then sausage-makers think that sausages matter a lot. We should take neither at their word.

I fear that lefties who fret about the Mail's antics are actually playing into its hands. Like a has-been popstar craving attention, the papers are resorting to ever-more desperate efforts to attract eyeballs. Linkbait is now a business model, and your outrage is their profits.

Let's be clear. The newspaper business is a relatively minor one - the average household spends less each week on papers than it does on fish - which doesn't deserve the attention we give it.

Comments

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Is it possible, though, that the problem is a negative one? Not that the Daily Mail persuades its readers of anything, but that it deprives them of information and arguments they might otherwise have and that might support progressive causes. You might say the function of the right wing press is the equivalent of shouting 'I'm not listening, I'm not listening, I'm not listening' drowning out evidence about, say, the size and nature of the welfare budget. The readers might be sceptical, but they still don't have the information they need.

I don't understand why, but organizations do appear sensitive to adverse press coverage. At least based on my limited experience. So one reason we might care about newspapers' misconduct could be, in the context of this example, that the relevant organizations react by incarcerating more people with mental health problems. You might be correct such a reaction would make little sense, but I reckon papers are still surprisingly powerful.

Your comment about newspapers desperate attempts to attract eyeballs, reminded me of a certain Buddhist group in Japan that once asked their members not to buy newspaper editions that wrote scandal about it, because the increase in sales encouraged the newspapers to do it even more. I believe the members followed that advice and the scandalous stories all but stopped.

The ancient Romans used cheerleaders and rabblerousers, to good effect. In the 19thC buying votes through beer and coins was gradually phased out and newspapers took over. Now I would imagine things are a bit more difficult. Certainly the Currant Bun and Mail still do their bit as rabblerousers but as you say the effect is wearing off. Worse still Twitter etc are not yet controlled by a latter-day Rothermere or Harmsworth. Perhaps this is an upcoming role for GCHQ. Personally I am hoping for a return of the beer and coin technique.

The priorities that are adopted by Britain's elite crime fighting force [SOCA] will be partly based upon the number of column inches newspapers give to different types of organised criminality, [Sir Stephen Lander, Chairman of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency and former Director General of the Security Service MI5] disclosed.

Researchers at the Home Office have looked at about 30 newspapers, divided equally among broadsheet and compact newspapers, the tabloids, and the regional press, over the past five years. They have calculated which organised crime issues are the most pressing by measuring the column inches and number of stories devoted to each subject. Organised immigration crime came first, followed by drugs.

Sir Stephen explained: "The brainboxes in the Home Office have been putting together a sort of harm model."

The right-wing press represents about two thirds of circulation at the national level, and what it does is: a) create the news agenda that other 'impartial' media entities with vastly greater reach, like the BBC, have to largely stick to; b) deploy journalists to particular investigations or stories that can have debate-shaping impact; c) create, or at least help perpetuate, distorted views of reality on important questions - feeding people with scare stories about asylum seekers and unrepresentative cases of benefit fraud, while systematically depriving them of information about genuine scandals like phone hacking for almost a decade.

Most importantly, it's the second face of power that's being used here: the right-wing press's ability to monster left-wing governments defines the outer limits of political viability, and increases the political cost of left-wing positions being taken on, for instance, crime, asylum seekers, drugs, etc.

Surely the issue isn't to what degree newspapers influence which political party people vote for, it's to what degree they influence the Overton window. This influence is harder to measure, but just as important - do you have any research on that?